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Following the Supreme Court's decision in Bilski v. Kappos, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) plans to release new guidance as to which patent applications will be accepted, and which will not. As part of this process, they are seeking input from the public about how that guidance should be structured.

Senator Patrick Leahy yesterday introduced the "Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act" (COICA). This flawed bill would allow the Attorney General and the Department of Justice to break the Internet one domain at a time

First some definitions. In this post let’s define an “open standard” as one that is: 1) freely available, 2) developed in an open process and 3) freely implementable, e.g., is royalty free. I freely acknowledge that there are interests out there that attempt to soften these criteria, but that only demonstrates the competitive power presented by truly open standards.

Judge Tena Campbell has today ruled against SCO, who had asked to go forward against IBM in SCO v. IBM, without letting IBM go forward on its most significant claims. "The court declines," her order says, to reopen anything now, because too much depends on what happens in SCO v. Novell, and it doesn't make sense to divide the two cases.

Right now I'm facing what I'd consider the most outrageous case that I've been involved so far: A manufacturer of Linux-based embedded devices (no, I will not name the company) really has the guts to go in front of court and sue another company for modifying the firmware on those devices. More specifically, the only modifications to program code are on the GPL licensed parts of the software.

Today 377 members of the European Parliament adopted a written declaration on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in which they demand greater transparency, assert that ISPs should not up end being liable for data sent through their networks, and say that ACTA "should not force limitations upon judicial due process

As you likely heard on any number of news sites, Oracle has filed suit against Google, claiming that Android infringes some of its Java-related copyrights and patents. Too little information is available about the copyright infringement claim to say much about it yet; we expect we'll learn more as the case proceeds.